Why Crypto Sucks

I have spent years building marketing and informational websites in the blockchain space: Polkadot, Cardano, ConsenSys. I know the technology, the teams, and the genuine ambition behind a lot of this work. I also think crypto, as most people experience it today, is bad at the job it claims to care about most. Moving and holding value should not feel like defusing a bomb.

This is not an argument that blockchains have no use cases. It is an argument about what ordinary people actually get when they open a wallet instead of a banking app.

The UX gap is not subtle

Open Monzo, Starling, or Revolut. You see a balance. You send money with a name check. If you fat-finger a payment, there is often a recovery path. Fraud protection exists. Support exists. Onboarding is a phone number and a selfie, not a lecture on elliptic curve cryptography.

Now open a typical crypto wallet.

You get a seed phrase you are told never to lose, never photograph, never store in the cloud, and never forget, while also backing it up somehow. You learn about networks, gas, confirmations, and contract addresses that look like someone sneezed on a keyboard. Send USDC on the wrong chain and your money is not “pending.” It is gone or stuck in a support ticket no one owes you.

Challenger banks productised trust. Crypto exported the risk to the user and called that freedom.

That is why adoption stalls outside speculation. People do not want sovereignty over their assets if sovereignty means no undo button and no one to call when things go wrong. They want money that works on a Thursday night when they are tired.

The challenger bank playbook

Something happened in retail banking while crypto was arguing about monetary theory. Challenger banks did not win by inventing new kinds of money. They won by making ordinary money feel modern. Sign up in minutes. See your balance instantly. Get notified when you spend. Split a bill without visiting a branch. For millions of people, that was reason enough to leave legacy banking apps that looked and behaved like they were designed in 2009.

That is a UX revolution in the plain sense: fewer steps, clearer language, mobile-first design, and software that treats the user as a person with a phone, not a compliance file. Traditional banks have spent years playing catch-up. Some still have not.

Crypto had the same opening and largely wasted it. The industry talked about replacing banks while shipping interfaces that feel like developer tools with a price chart attached. When UX does matter in crypto, the proof is already here: Coinbase built a large mainstream business by doing the boring work. Simple onboarding. Familiar buy-and-sell flows. An app that does not demand that you understand keys before you can take part. It is still crypto underneath, but the surface behaves more like a consumer product than a protocol explorer.

That is the comparison that should sting. Challenger banks improved banking without asking customers to become systems administrators. Coinbase showed that millions of people will touch crypto if you hide enough of the sharp edges. Most of the ecosystem still refuses to learn from either example, which is why the default wallet experience feels a decade behind the apps people already trust with their paycheque.

Speed and cost were supposed to be the point

Early Bitcoin rhetoric was about bypassing slow, expensive intermediaries. In practice, many users meet crypto through centralised exchanges that feel like banks with worse customer service, then pay layer-one fees that would make a legacy bank blush, then wait anyway.

Layer 2s and new chains improved throughput, but they multiplied confusion. Bridging between ecosystems is where UX goes to die. The industry solved scaling mostly by adding more places to lose funds.

Meanwhile, challenger banks ship instant domestic payments, clear activity feeds, spending categories, and cards that work at the pub. The revolution is losing a usability benchmark set by apps people already have on their home screen.

Security theatre vs actual safety

Crypto culture treats self-custody as a moral virtue. For a narrow slice of technically confident users, fine. For everyone else, it is a trap.

Most people are not going to verify contract source code. Most people will click a phishing link eventually. Most people do not want a hardware device and a metal plate in a drawer as part of their financial life.

Challenger banks assume humans make mistakes and design around that. Crypto often assumes infallibility and punishes deviation with total loss. That is not a superior financial system. It is a harsher one.

From 2008 crisis to a familiar arc

Bitcoin did not appear in a vacuum. It landed in the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis: bailouts for institutions, pain for everyone else, and a collapse of trust in the gatekeepers of money. The white paper language was technical, but the emotional payload was revolutionary. Strip out trusted third parties. Replace politics with code. Build money that politicians cannot print into oblivion.

That story had power because the alternative had just failed in public.

Revolutions often start with a clean moral contrast: the old order is corrupt, the new order will be transparent, participatory, and fair. Then reality arrives. Compromise, competition for control, institutions that reproduce the old dynamics under new branding.

You do not have to squint hard to see the pattern.

Leninism began with liberation rhetoric and ended with a bureaucracy that consumed its own ideals. I am not saying crypto is Soviet Russia. I am saying movements that promise to abolish hierarchy have a habit of building new hierarchies, especially when power, money, and ideology collide.

Bitcoin’s cypherpunk roots talked about individual sovereignty and resisting state money. What grew around it included centralised exchanges that function as banks, venture-funded chains that function as platforms, influencer pumps that function as boiler rooms, and on-ramps that require the same identity documents as the old system, only with fewer protections.

The revolution did not abolish finance. It re-layered finance with worse UX and better memes.

Stalinism is the wrong word, but the shape is familiar

Crypto is not a dictatorship. Nobody is sending wallet developers to a gulag. The useful comparison is structural, not literal. One feature of Stalinism was the cult of personality: the leader presented as the living embodiment of the revolution, beyond ordinary scrutiny or criticism.

Early ideal: open participation, rules without rulers, exit from captured institutions.

Later reality: concentrated choke points. A handful of exchanges, custodians, stablecoin issuers, and infrastructure providers mediate most real-world activity. Founder worship follows the same script. A charismatic CEO, a cult of personality on social media, and a base that treats scepticism as disloyalty. Users still depend on trusted parties. They just have worse recourse when those parties fail.

FTX was not a bug in one company. It was a reminder that the user-facing system still routes through entities that look a lot like the intermediaries crypto was meant to obsolete, cult-of-personality founders included, except with weaker regulation and stronger marketing.

The ideology stayed revolutionary. The experience became institutional in all the ways that matter when you need your money back.

The vanguard mentality

Many crypto companies do not behave like normal technology businesses. They behave like cults with a payroll. There is an inner circle that talks like a vanguard party: early believers, true builders, the people who “get it.” Everyone else is a nocoiner, a tradfi shill, or a tourist who will panic sell at the bottom. Dissent is betrayal. Rival chains are not competitors. They are heresies. Grudges last for years.

That posture is flattering if you are inside it and exhausting if you are not. It also papers over an awkward fact: many of the loudest moral actors in the space are not moral actors in any ordinary sense. Exchanges freeze withdrawals when liquidity runs short. Projects rewrite tokenomics when the chart turns. Influencers promote what they are paid to promote. VCs exit into retail liquidity. Then the same voices return to lecture the public about freedom, corruption, and the evils of traditional finance.

Moral superiority is the brand. Accountable behaviour is optional. You do not need to join a movement to open a current account at a challenger bank. Too much of crypto wants disciples, not customers, which is a strange way to win mass adoption and an even stranger way to claim you are fixing the world.

Question the line and you become the problem. Critics are cast out so the chair’s ego can stay intact. This mentality makes crypto companies particularly susceptible to the bullshit of yes men, shills, and charlatans, many of whom I have seen rise to the top of crypto companies at the expense of honest evangelists and true believers.

What would “good” look like?

Crypto does not suck because the idea is useless. It sucks because the industry repeatedly chooses spectacle over ergonomics, speculation over settlement, and ideology over accountability.

A credible future would look boring on purpose:

• Recovery flows and protections for honest mistakes
• Human-readable transaction previews
• Defaults that protect users instead of lecturing them
• Fees predictable enough to compare with a bank transfer
• On-ramps that do not require a computer science degree

Until then, challenger banks will keep winning the only scoreboard that matters for mass adoption: ordinary people trying to pay rent, split a bill, or save without fear.

The bottom line

The 2008 crisis justified anger at the financial system. It did not automatically justify every experiment that followed. Crypto’s first wave told a revolutionary story. Its mainstream user experience tells a different one: you are your own bank, which mostly means you are your own customer support, fraud department, and disaster recovery team.

That is not liberation for most people. It is homework.

We can build better interfaces, better standards, and better products. But we should stop pretending the current default UX competes with modern banking apps. It does not. It’s not even close.

If you are building in this space and want to close that gap, get in touch. I am more interested in fixing the problem than rewriting the manifesto.